Computer systems are currently in wide use. Many computer systems use a markup language in order to interpret and present the content on a given page.
A markup language describes the structure of a website (or other content) semantically, and includes cues for its presentation. One example of a markup language is hypertext markup language (HTML), and variants thereof. HTML is written using markup language elements. Each element normally includes an opening tag and a closing tag, although some elements use a single, unpaired tag. A web browser reads the markup language documents and composes them into audible or visible pages. A markup language often allows an author to embed objects or documents into the structure of a page.
In some scenarios, an author may generate a markup language description of content (e.g., a page) that embeds a document or object. The author may wish the document or object to be transformed in some way, prior to having it rendered. In some cases, the author may be sending the content to a receiving party. The content may include data to be presented, that is in a format not normally understood by the receiving party, if the receiving party is performing conventional markup language processing. In such a case, while many markup language variations have a rich set of capabilities for presenting a wide set of data, they do not have a built in transformation specification mechanism in order to specify a transformation that is to be performed on an item of content, prior to rendering it.
An example may be helpful. Assume that a piece of client software is communicating with a content management server. Assume further that the client software wishes to create a new piece of content, using a markup description language. If the client has a document in a word processing format that it would like presented as a static image within the rendered content, there is no standard mechanism within markup languages to communicate this.
In order to overcome this difficulty, the client may perform the transformation before using the markup language to communicate the content. However, this requires the client to have the ability to convert from one format to another, and this may not be the case. For instance, the client device may be constrained in terms of its computational and memory resources. Similarly, it may be that the client device has relatively little network bandwidth and the transformation may transform the document into a larger amount of data that needs to be transmitted (e.g., transforming a word processing document into an image can greatly expand the amount of information corresponding to the document). In such cases, it may be less desirable for the client device to perform the transformation and then transmit the transformed version of the document.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.